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Off the Grid in the City

The slatted door in one SOL home opens onto a living room with a polished concrete floor and a well-insulated concrete block wall. The sofa is a Carter by Gus, and the artwork is a photo detail of a 1954 Seymour Fogel mural.Credit
Ryann Ford for The New York Times

AUSTIN, Tex.

MINNIE J. CHAPA, a 75-year-old great-grandmother and proud renter of a nearly new, minimalist-style, three-bedroom home here, said old neighbors from Haskell Street, a stretch of cottages just east of downtown where she spent nearly 50 years, regularly ask her, “Do you live over there in the matchbox houses?”

To describe SOL Austin, the five-and-a-half-acre development in which Ms. Chapa resides, as “the matchbox houses” is both accurate and unfair.

Yes, the houses are small by American standards (they range from 1,030 to 1,816 square feet), and the architectural style is decidedly rectilinear. But the boxiness is mediated by the skyward tilt of butterfly roofs, angled to hold photovoltaic arrays and channel rainwater into barrels.

SOL, an acronym for Solutions Oriented Living, is an ambitious attempt to upend the conventions of the American subdivision. It was developed by a partnership between Chris Krager, a 43-year-old architect who heads a firm called KRDB, and Russell M. Becker, 47, a civil engineer and general manager and owner of Beck-Reit & Sons Ltd., a construction company.

The community is intended not just to be sustainable in its design and materials, but “net zero” — in other words, a housing development that would produce all the energy it consumed, with super-efficient homes outfitted with solar panels and geothermal wells. Moreover, this small development is also doing its part to take on the problems of economic and social injustice.

That it has been, so far, only partly successful in achieving these goals makes it no less interesting as a design experiment.

SOL is in East Austin, about three miles from downtown, an area designated African-American by a 1928 city plan. In 1962, the construction of I-35, a major north-south artery, further isolated the area’s population.

Over the last decade, however, those priced out of more-desirable neighborhoods to the south began to migrate east. The 2010 census showed a 40 percent increase in the area’s white population, while the number of minority residents dropped. During the same period, skyrocketing property taxes forced many longtime homeowners out.

Mr. Krager, who has a degree in business from Michigan State University and ran a Chicago mortgage brokerage before he became an architect, has made a practice of buying small pieces of property for which he designs and builds thoughtfully laid out modern homes, priced to appeal to young creative types who normally couldn’t afford an architect. Mainly, he’s done this in East Austin — which essentially makes him part of the problem.

“Ten years ago, we paid $15,000 for the first lots we built on in East Austin,” Mr. Krager said. “On that same street now, lots are $150,000.”

He began looking at land not just east of I-35, but farther out, east of a secondary highway, 183. When he found a live oak tree farm under the flight path of the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, he and Mr. Becker bought it in 2007, for $700,000, and began work on a 40-house development.

“I figured that while we were at it, we might as well take all of our interests as a design firm and put them into one prototype project,” Mr. Krager said. He wanted to “examine sustainability on a more holistic level, that would not just look at green buildings, but in our interest in affordability, in the economic and social components of sustainability as well.”

Indeed, every house in SOL achieves the same high level of energy conservation: they were all designed to meet the federal Department of Energy’s guidelines for net-zero capable construction, which is to say, they use 55 percent less energy than a typical house (circa 2006). And all of them are constructed from a menu of materials (including low-V.O.C. paints that don’t contribute to air pollution and cabinets that don’t emit formaldehyde) widely regarded as green.

But the recession, the partners said, made the net-zero agenda impossible to carry out. Just as they were breaking ground — at the exact moment the economy derailed in autumn of 2008 — financing dried up. Drilling 40 geothermal wells, one for each house, was out of the question.

“I would have liked to have mandated the photovoltaic arrays,” Mr. Krager said. But he found that buyers were often unable or unwilling to roll the cost (an extra $24,000 for an array substantial enough to fully power a house) into their mortgages. And Mr. Krager, who was embarking on an $8 million to $9 million project for a market that no longer existed, wasn’t in a position to argue.

For the development’s market-rate houses — 11 of which have been sold, and 13 of which have yet to be built — solar power became an option. Homeowners installed arrays over time, as rebates from Austin Energy and tax credits from the federal government became available. So far, only four market-rate houses sport arrays and only one is also heated and cooled by a geothermal well.

SOL may never get to net zero (Mr. Krager no longer markets it that way), but much of his idealistic vision is intact. For one thing, close to half the homes are reserved for low-income renters and buyers.

Before the housing bubble burst, Mr. Krager hammered out a plan with Mark Rogers, executive director of the nonprofit Guadalupe Neighborhood Development Corporation, to sell 16 of the 40 homes to the organization. The group, in turn, sold eight of the houses at a subsidized rate to low-income buyers (who typically were able to buy a house valued at more than $200,000 for half price) and rented the other eight to tenants like Ms. Chapa, who pays $600 a month.

Mr. Krager made this arrangement, he insisted, because economic sustainability was part of his vision, but it is also true that the fact that he had already sold more than a third of the units is what convinced his bank that, despite the housing crash, the project was viable. And with those 16 subsidized homes, Mr. Krager could dictate solar power: each of those houses has a photovoltaic collector on the roof, although Guadalupe’s budget didn’t cover arrays large enough to produce as much power as the houses consume.

IN appearance, at least, SOL resembles a typical suburban development. There is even a cul de sac, as required by fire code.

But the rhythm of the place is different in many ways. The lots are smaller, and each house is positioned to maximize its use of what Mr. Krager calls “quality outdoor space”: U-shaped and H-shaped homes embrace grassy courtyards where residents put their Webers, picnic tables and hammocks.

“I feel like it’s part of the house,” said Sandra Barry, 29, a television news producer who shares her 1,090-square-foot, two-bedroom, one-bath house with her husband, James McNown, a 26-year-old silk-screen printer.

And unlike the more traditional development across Perry Road, which presents an unbroken line of two-car garages and putty-colored facades, SOL is variegated and colorful, and has a lightness that makes it look pleasantly toylike. (It also includes a 1930s cottage, original to the property, that was moved across the site, renovated by University of Texas students and seamlessly wed to a modern addition.)

The houses do look a little like matchboxes, but inside they are spacious and light-filled. Typically, there’s an open kitchen, a hallway with a handy built-in desk, generous closets and cleverly disguised storage areas.

But the most obvious thing that distinguishes them is the shape and placement of their windows. Elongated clerestory windows maximize daylight while keeping heat gain (this is Texas, remember) to a minimum.

The owners of the market-rate houses, which all sold at prices in the low $200,000’s, also set this place apart. They tend to be in their mid-20s to early 30s, and part of the creative culture for which the city is known.

Ms. Barry and Mr. McNown, who moved to SOL in April of 2010, just happened upon the development. “We fell in love with it as soon as we saw the design,” Mr. McNown said.

But while the green aspects of the development were a draw, the couple didn’t install solar panels until last year. “The city had an excellent rebate this summer,” Ms. Barry said. Through this year’s record-setting run of 100-degree days they were racking up minuscule $13 monthly electric bills.

To date, there is only one household in which achieving net zero is a top priority. The first market-rate house sold, it belongs to Pete Brubaker, 34, a systems engineer, and his wife, Erin Swaney, 32, a microbiologist. So far, they are the only homeowners who have paid to install the geothermal well and the sophisticated system that monitors and analyzes their energy use (it costs about $10,000). And as Mr. Brubaker pointed out, as long as features like those and the solar panels are optional, the development will never be truly net zero.

Still, its green aspirations are only one aspect of the appeal. While Mr. Krager hasn’t quite succeeded in building a subdivision that doubles as a power plant, he has created a new type of suburb.

Most of the young homesteaders say they love the way the neighborhood is filling up with others like them, but they also praise the presence of the subsidized renters and homeowners, a generally older and more racially diverse group. In short, they are buying into the 1950s suburban ideal without leaving the city behind.

Mr. Krager has cited the innovative postwar California developer Joseph Eichler as an inspiration, as well as the pedestrian-scaled neighborhoods built by the New Urbanists since the 1980s. But his polished modern architecture combined with an attention to social issues is uniquely of the moment and seems to have hit the sweet spot with the youngest generation of homebuyers.

He and Mr. Becker have explored development opportunities in Albuquerque and Fort Worth, but Austin seems like the natural place for his approach to take off. For one thing, the city has lofty environmental goals, including a requirement that all new homes be “zero energy capable” by 2015, or about 65 percent more energy efficient than homes built since 2006. Also, the city council recently approved plans for increased downtown density that involve levying fees on developers of downtown residential towers that exceed the height permitted by zoning. The fees are intended to fund affordable housing on the outskirts of downtown.

And as Lucia Athens, the city’s chief sustainability officer, noted, because Texas is a “car-dominated society” and not everybody wants to live downtown, a green version of “the suburban prototype,” one that “isn’t intimidating and feels kind of familiar,” might prove invaluable.

In any case, Mr. Krager and Mr. Becker are one home sale away from paying off the $1.2 million bank loan that paid for the development’s infrastructure, like sewage and water systems, meaning they have weathered the housing bust and are beginning to see a profit. Their lenders are increasingly willing to let them build spec houses, homes that don’t have a buyer before construction. And Mr. Krager believes that built houses will sell faster than those shown to buyers in computer renderings, so SOL will likely be complete by late next year.

Austin’s first true net-zero subdivision may have to wait until domestic energy generation is required by law, but for now, the developers of SOL have done well (or, at least, survived) by doing pretty good.

A version of this article appears in print on February 2, 2012, on page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Off the Grid In the City. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe